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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Rants
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The daughter lures me in, there's a career fair at her school she wants to go, see what's on offer...
I know that her school, it's convenient, handy to her home, but it has a pretty bad reputation otherwise. Not the best school. Not by a longshot. The demographic of the students, it's ranking province wide on the tests, not my choice, but as always her mother knows best. Sure.
We go, and it's filled with stalls advertising such companies as Mr. Lube, Part's Source, AutoValue, Earl's, WTF? Where's Law, Medicine, Engineering? But no, this is a school exclusively devoted to raising it's students above the level of their parents, any of these jobs would be "success" in their terms, and I'm filled with despair...
Never mind. She knows better, she's there to grab a few free treats and snacks and then we leave, she gets it as well, laughs, shrugs it off, for me it's not so easy...
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Rants
- Hits: 1859
And on these couches I've watched more TV than anyone should ever watch...Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil, Live Kelly, Cityline, it's all idiocy. Sheer and utter vacuous idiocy. I never realized it was this bad.
The new couch, they've got cable, all the channels, 150 or more. New shows, things like Thrift Hunters, which sounds like it would be right up my alley, only it's more garbage, people going to Value Village and buying trash to resell on for a hefty profit on eBay, and watching the credits I see that Telefilm Canada had a hand in it, other Canadian sponsors, why, given it's set in the US, the show looks like it had a budget of roughly $25.00 per episode, hours spent surfing the guide to find nothing to watch, movies, entertainment, the most preposterous confabulations passed off as history, endless unreality, talk shows, interrupted by unending adverts for rubbish, new cars, products, junk food, quack medicines with little hope of remedy and a long list of dire and possibly fatal side effects, if the illness doesn't kill you the cure most certainly will, the promoted prescriptions promising a physical cure for a purely spiritual disease, malaise, the virus of bad ideas and inferior morality passed on to consumers through the very medium that only a short advertisement ago was promising a cure...Just turn it off and the healing will begin. Read a book. Go for a walk. Talk to a human being.
It's insane.
At a friends, Netflix, watching a documentary on Minimalism, she's not getting it, she notices every for 50% off advert, every expansive shoe collection, admiring the ostentation, the very lavish houses and lifestyles the show is seeking to condemn, her attention, she's proving the point...
Days Pass.
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Rants
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Link of the day or rant? Hard to decide. You make up your mind.
Kaleo Pharma markets an injection tool to prevent Heroin overdoses. $4500 per needle. Overpriced? There are opinions for sure.
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Rants
- Hits: 1967
December 5th, back in Calgary, time to pick up my Damage Deposit from Emerald Property Management. I left no forwarding address, had none, told Marty (the onsite landlord) that I'd pick it up from their head office next time I was in Calgary.
Monday, December 5, this is the next time in Calgary, after a cold night in the Jeep (frozen, -26, didn't unpack the back properly and every time you touched something you got colder and colder, up at 6:30, down to Beano for the long morning coffee and attempt to warm up, waiting for Emerald to open), 9:30, finally, and I go to pick up my cheque.
The landlord - Marty - and I agreed - when I left, it wasn't perfect - perfect for me, not for them, didn't steam clean the carpets, the drapes, didn't clean the inserts on the stove, he estimated the deductions, maybe $75.00 for miscellaneous cleaning, tops, $100 for drapes and carpets, max, cheque would be ready in 2 weeks, 10 business days.
So I'm expecting the cheque to be ready. Oh yeah. Cheque will be ready, it's December 5th, after all...I've been gone over a month. And with that cheque I'll pay child support, do some Xmas shopping, maybe have a meal, and with luck enough gas to get back to the Koot's. (I hadn't picked up the restaurant gig yet.).
I'm at the office at 9:30 - 2nd one there, there's an irate middle aged couple ahead of me, various grievances, an indifferent receptionist, I wait my turn.
They're pretty irate and she's as sympathetic as she can be while putting it all down to "understandable mistakes...paperwork...misunderstanding...you know, we have a lot of tenants...". She's not taking their side, and they're not too sympathetic, but even just eavesdropping you get the clear idea that they've fucked up, repeatedly, big time. And they're gonna do it again. It's a busy little office, people forever coming and going, mostly staff, I don't understand this property management thing but is sure involves a lot of support personal nowhere near the properties to be let...
Finally, my turn. The couple before me, their own experience, it's made me a bit suspicious. I get my cheque, in a white Emerald Envelope. Leaving, on the way out the door, I open it, check the amount, just to be sure before I get to the bank...
WHAT THE FUCK!
I swallow my irateness, all the venom that's rising up, the sarcasm, the bile and vitriol, address the secretary: "Excuse me, this appears to be incorrect, is there anyone I can speak to about this...?"
There's no "appears to be incorrect", it patently is, and my moving out of province has made me an easy target for predacious landlords...
She searches for the number, asks where I live, I give her the old address, my old contact, Marty, apparently he's not the main contact...
She's busy. While she's searching and making calls on my behalf she answers no less than a dozen other calls, all of which seem to be escalating complaints of the sort the couple ahead of me had, mislaid postdated cheques, premature eviction notices, lack of essential services...no one in their right mind wants her job...
Finally she finds it, the number of my contact, I make the call, leave a message.
He calls me back an hour later. "Sorry for the misunderstanding..."...the cheque was only for $100.00 because the other $625.00 was mailed out to my last known address. Really? Really? I mean, why would you mail my damage deposit to the one address you knew I had moved out of? And why would you only mail a portion of it - $625.00 - and keep the other $100.00 at the head office? And - not to be too difficult - why are the cleaning suites/cleaning carpets, drapes fees so out of line with what I was quoted by Marty, the actual, onsite landlord who presumably would be doing all of the above?
He hasn't got any answers...he'll get back to me.
A couple of hours later he does. I've got nothing better to do than drive around Calgary and wait - at the moment it's appearing as if I'll be staying, the gas money to return home, I squandered that on the kids dinner the night before, this cheque, it was gonna pay my way home. Maybe. Not likely.
The reason is...well, there's no reason. They estimated the costs. Took a wild guess. They haven't got the bill yet for the cleaning of the carpets and drapes or the estimate of the time it cost to clean the place from Marty. I'm annoyed, seriously annoyed, I know I'm being fucked...they'll just mail me the remainder, do I have a forwarding address?
NO I DO NOT! And I emphatically underscore the fact that I'm not returning to pick up another cheque, that it's been over 30 days since I vacated the premise and therefore they should have all bills for all related expenses, this is bollocks (politely), but I want my damage deposit back, NOW!, ...
He argues, can't do it, needs to check the charges, I tell him to call the companies, they've done the work, they'll know the billing, I'm returning to BC tomorrow and I want my cheque, and finally, after far, far too much wrangling I get my damage deposit back. Some $961 odd dollars. Fair. But, really, why should one have to argue that long, that hard, for what's rightfully theirs? The reason, simple, if you don't question it they will fuck you, don't question the charges, the incompetence, and the money is theirs, SYSTEMATIC AND PREMEDITATED INCOMPETENCE!
Marty, the old landlord calls me in January to tell me that my damage deposit is ready, he has the cheque, I'm not Emerald, I should be, I just tell him that I've already gotten it...
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Rants
- Hits: 1872
The owner has just gotten a report card emailed to him from his 10 year old daughter's "Progressive" school, an overpriced Montessori/French Immersion school for the presumably gifted children of wealthy and privileged parents.
It's one of those modern, fucked up affairs that rate everything from social interaction to abstract art, group play, and comparable vocabulary, there's easily 20 categories on it. And the grading, well, they've got they're own system, a series of colored buttons indicating the childs/prodigies progress in each area, there's a green button, yellow button, orange button and presumably (but not on this report card) a red button. But search as we may there's no key or legend on the report card, I look through it 2, 3 times.
And while the coloring is fairly intuitive, mapped, I imagine, after traffic lights, to the rich immigrant parent it's useless. He wants a description of the child's progress. A grade would be nice, swell even, but they don't do that anymore, numbers, people can figure those out, take offense, colors, well, that's a different story.
Eventually we find it, the key, legend, it's embedded in the body of the email, you gotta scroll to find it, not on the attached accompanying report card. These are teachers, educated people, a minimum of a BA, what in the fuck were they thinking? And the key, it's what you'd expect, exactly, bigger words than a lot of parents can deal with but they're trying to make clear the distinction between they "The Educated Chaperones of Tomorrows Genius" and you, the uneducated fuckwit of a parent. And if you'd argue you weren't a fuckwit, think about it, you sent them to that school, didn't you?
And you think, at the end, why even the key, why not have the comments directly in the "grading" box, why bother with the color coding, a written assessment is what it translates to, do away with the references and fill it in. But they're educated and so infatuated with all this progressive bullshit that they've forgotten all common sense.